Realizing that their friendship was far more important than winning the primary, Republican presidential frontrunners (prolonged sigh) Donald Trump and (sharp noise of disgust) Sen. Ted Cruz announced in a joint press conference late Monday night that they planned to share first place in the Iowa caucus.

The candidates, finding that competing for Iowa had jeopardized their long held rapport, came to the conclusion that neither Iowa’s 30 delegates, nor the free positive media coverage that came from a first-place finish in Iowa, nor even the sense of inevitability that an Iowa victory engenders, was worth such an outcome.

According to staff from both campaigns, the decision to share the victory was made on a whim by Sen. Cruz at around 10 PM on the night of the caucus. Votes were just beginning to be counted, and all indicators showed that the race could go either way. Cruz had begun work on his victory speech, but the more that he wrote the less emotionally fulfilled he felt. Sources have confirmed that at this point a single tear rolled down Cruz’s face as he realized what he had thrown away to reach for this prize.

Tears now streaming down his face, Cruz personally called Donald Trump’s campaign headquarters and, stammering and hyperventilating, asked to talk to “the man [he’d] spent so many happy hours with.” When Cruz was then redirected to Trump and told him how he truly felt, Trump too burst into tears and agreed right then and there that this rift between them had to be mended.

The two old friends and their campaigns hastily organized a joint event at which they would announce that, no matter what the final result turned out to be, they would split credit for winning Iowa and, consequently, all the positive coverage that would ensue. This event was greeted with high praise by both the media and the general public, who, to quote one bystander, were “just happy to see these guys together again.”

Even representatives from rival campaigns had nothing but good things to say about this development. One of Ben Carson’s staffers present at the press conference said that when Trump and Cruz made their announcement it “just about melted my heart” and that “you know, this gives me hope that American politics can rise above the nastiness it’s been stuck in for the last 230 years.”

At press time, Sen. Marco Rubio had pulled a massive upset victory in Iowa after voters realized that both Trump and Cruz were completely unelectable.

Ted Cruz, president. The idea itself sends shivers down many a spine. Probably because it’s a Hispanic name and therefore associated with illegal immigrants, stolen jobs, and drugs, but that can be overcome. Besides, he was born in Canada, so he can’t be that bad–wait, what? He was born in Canada? And he admits it? Oh, but he’s still a natural born citizen. Sure. Okay. If you say so. As long as he as a birth certificate and isn’t black.

Cruz is likely the bravest, most patriotic man in the country this week. He had the courage to come out and tell us all what everyone was already thinking. Many others have been dilly-dallying, wishy-washing, and in general just namby-pambies, but finally we have a straight-talking, down-to-earth guy who can really open up about his feelings.

And my, what strong feelings those are. Liberty! Liberty for all! Let freedom ring! Freedom for women to surrender their bodies to the state. Freedom for minorities to be disproportionately arrested and shot. Freedom from believing in silly little things like climate change and evolution. Freedom to be required to attend campaign speeches, like the students at Liberty University, where Cruz gave his touching speech. And of course, freedom to wear shirts supporting Rand Paul (a Cruz opponent) at the aforementioned speech.

In addition to such varied liberties, Cruz argued for a repeal of most of the government. A return to the Constitution in its purest form, where blacks count as 3/5ths of a person. Okay, he didn’t specifically mention that part of the Constitution.

When readme went to check out Cruz’s campaign online, they were surprised to see that the website tedcruz.com is actually in support of both Obama and immigration reform. While Cruz does support immigration reform, encouraging us to “imagine a president that finally, finally, finally secures the borders,” and a legal system that celebrates those who come here for the American dream, he doesn’t seem to be such a fan of Obama. Because of course, Obama’s a communist Muslim eco-fanatic. readme finally made it over to tedcruz.org, which seemed to be more in line with the whole “Liberty!” thing. However, the occasional link to nigerian-prince.com made readme wonder if the whole thing wasn’t a scam.

Anyways, Cruz is so brave for telling us that he’s ready to make a big fuss until he gets a poor showing in the first (of 50) primaries, in which case he’ll promptly shut up and drop out like they always do. It takes so much courage to re-affirm broad, sweeping generalizations to a captive audience of college kids. We at readme wish him the best of luck on his journey.

We’ve covered this topic before, as have many of those worthy to be considered our peers: Stephen Colbert, the Onion, Jon Stewart, Clickhole, and John Oliver, to name a few. Just recently, Obama decided to weigh in on the issue. However, the debate still felt like it was missing something. Thankfully, Senator Ted Cruz was there to provide us with yet another gem of political wisdom, from the usual source of political wisdom these days: Twitter.

“Net Neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet. The Internet should not operate at the speed of government,” he tweeted, presumably following them up with hashtags like #obamacaresucks and #someonepleasepayattentiontome. Numerous commentators tried to explain to Cruz that net neutrality is actually not like Obamacare, but maybe what Cruz meant was that the two are similar in that Obama cares about both.

Cruz’s spokeswoman issued a follow up tweet to clarify their position: “Net neutrality puts gov’t in charge of determining pricing, terms of service, and what products can be delivered. Sound like Obamacare much?” If by that she means that the government determines that prices have to be fair, terms of service can’t be tilted in anyone’s favor, and that the products have to be genuine, yeah, it does vaguely sound like Obamacare. Also like a thing we kind of need.

Because seriously, these are cable companies we’re talking about here. Remember what happened a while back between Netflix and Comcast. Under the current, non-net-neutral rules, Comcast gets to charge content providers like Netflix for being on the Internet. But during negotiations, a strange thing happened. Comcast users began to notice Netflix videos took an unusually long time to load. This slow-down only happened to customers using Comcast, and only when they were watching Netflix. Completely by coincidence, readme is sure. And when Netflix agreed to Comcast’s prices, loading speeds returned to normal. Also probably a complete coincidence.

Such shakedowns would be banned under net neutrality. readme would explain to you why, except that net neutrality is so damn boring readme fell asleep trying to explakfghdvzfuhs. Sorry about that, readme just fell asleep on its keyboard while trying to explain how it couldn’t explain net neutrality. That’s how boring it is.

Internet providers want to convince us that net neutrality is a bad thing, and comparing it to Obamacare is an easy way to do that. But as we saw with Netflix, if net neutrality is like Obamacare, companies like Comcast are like that one douchebaggy insurance guy from the Incredibles who got thrown through a wall.

Knowing all this, readme almost wanted to think that Cruz was actually in support of both Obamacare and net neutrality, and this was just his way of showing it. Unfortunately, this is probably not the case. Cruz is of the top contenders for the Republican presidential race in 2016, which basically means he’s been putting forth a lot of presidential-sounding platforms and paying a lot of attention to Iowa (they vote first, which makes them just the best).
Along with the other 32 candidates the GOP is eyeing (March Madness will now be death-matches between aging white men, get your fantasy teams ready!), Cruz appears to be strengthening his supporter base by negating anything Obama says. It wasn’t until Obama officially came out in support of net neutrality that Cruz came out against it. Voters like that shit. Our current president may be on the way out, but it seems like his motto is going to stick around. Only this time it’s the Republicans who are crying for “Change!”

Well, folks, it’s 2014 and according to the math majors we know, that means it’s two whole years until the 2016 elections. But readme knows it’s never too early to obsess over elections, so we’ve taken the liberty of looking at some of the maybe-kinda-hopefully-hopefuls across the political spectrum and writing down the strangest real things people think we need to know about our potential Presidents. And, really, who wouldn’t vote for:

In what was uncomfortably close to a play on slavery tropes, beloved Rick Perry has recently praised Ted Cruz’s twenty-one hour filibuster, attempt to defund Obamacare and subsequent success in shutting down the government. Perry had his reservations, however.

Perry told reporter Jeff Zeleny that, “It would have been wiser for us to have laid the wood to the president — so to speak — in the sense of being able to call him out on this, let it become an issue of, ‘Mr. President, you own this,’, laying on the racially coded implication that he’d like to beat the president.

“This” being the fact that some Americans will be unable to keep their original health care plan now that Obamacare is taking full effect in our country. Because, you know, their healthcare plans were more expensive and less effective.

“He needs to stand up in front of the American people and say, ‘You know what? I perpetrated a fraud on you.” Continued Perry, who, during his failed run for candidacy in the 2012 election, spoke about ideas such as “legitimate rape” (i.e.rape that doesn’t cause pregnancy because it’s actually rape.), initiated an international incident after calling Turks terrorists, confused Libya and Lebanon and compared the oppression of gay school children to Christian school children . The list goes on.

Really, it might be for the best if Ted Cruz took a page out of Rick Perry’s book (oh, but he probably doesn’t own books) and gave a speech to the entire country which convinced us he was drunk. He probably didn’t do enough by quoting Disney during his filibuster, comparing congress to the WWF, citing the Little Engine that Can’t in his speeches or asserting that “The moon might be as intimidating as Obamacare”.

A presidential straw poll held by the conservative political group Values Voters placed Texas senator Ted Cruz firmly in the lead in terms of support for a 2016 presidential run. Now, it may seem a little early to be holding polls for an election three whole years in the future, but political elections are a lot like Christmas shopping. If you don’t start early you’ll find yourself on wacky holiday hijinks looking for a Turboman action figure.

You may remember Ted Cruz for his courageous efforts to deny citizens universal healthcare, plunge our country into debt and stagnation, and make political filibusters even more pointless than they already are. It is exactly these qualities that make him a perfect candidate for those at the Values Voters Summit, who praised his ‘no-surrender’ attitude in filibustering against a bill he voted in favor of afterwards anyways.

Unlike Cruz’s filibuster, his Summit speech was actually interrupted a half a dozen times by political protesters questioning his stance on immigration reform. Cruz used this as a chance to demonstrate his compassion of spirit, celebrating these protester’s rights to free speech before having security forcibly escort them off the premises. He commented to the crowd that “President Obama’s paid political operatives” were out in full force to stop him that day. Which is pretty low of our president, readme has to admit. Like, really, you could only afford to pay for six guys? I know we’re in the middle of a shutdown, but you really couldn’t convince Congress that the Getting Rid of Ted Cruz Fund was an essential part of the budget? Get your act together, dude.

Now, some may feel that calling Ted Cruz a top contender for the presidential race might be jumping the gun a bit, seeing as people only found out he existed like three weeks ago. But those people simply don’t understand politics. After all, it’s not like Cruz is only famous because of an isolated political stunt which effected (and yes, pedants, I am spelling that right) no real improvements on the way our government is run and will be forgotten the moment Miley Cyrus learns to make a clover shape with her tongue. No, surely Ted Cruz’s star will shine just as brightly in 2016 as it does now. He’s an icon, like, um, like that what’s-his-name, the Latino guy the GOP was so hyped up about a while back. Frig, what was he called? Um. Ah well, readme’ll remember it eventually. The point is, iconic.